U.K. Announces Rapid Review into Scale of Child Sexual Abuse by Grooming Gangs

Britain’s government on Thursday bowed to pressure and announced new investigations into child sexual exploitation and abuse, less than a month after Elon Musk, the billionaire tech mogul, used his social media platform X to highlight the issue in a series of vitriolic posts.

Speaking in Parliament, Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, said she had commissioned a rapid three-month audit into the “current scale and nature of gang-based exploitation across the country” that would examine data on the ethnicity of perpetrators.

She also said that the government would support and help fund up to five local inquiries into the issue of so-called grooming gangs — groups of men who were found to have sexually exploited thousands of girls in Britain, some as young as 11, in the 2000s and early 2010s. Most of the perpetrators were of British Pakistani heritage.

The scandal, which was widely covered in the British media in the 2010s and has already been the subject of local and national inquiries, spanned a number of towns and cities in which mostly white girls were exploited, assaulted and raped by groups of men.

According to a number of investigations, victims and parents who asked for help were often failed by the police and social services. Some police officers had referred to victims as “tarts” and to the girls’ abuse as a “lifestyle choice,” while other officials feared they would be labeled racist if they highlighted the ethnicity of the perpetrators.

Grooming gangs represent a fraction of the total number of recorded cases of child sexual abuse in England and Wales. Of 115,489 child sexual abuse crimes recorded in 2023, 4,228 cases — or 3.7 percent — involved groups of two or more perpetrators, according to official data published in November. And of those cases, 1,125 were perpetrated by relatives or family members at home.